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Taylor Adams is the author of Eyeshot, a debut thriller novel. T.J. Brearton is the author of Habit, Survivors, and the supernatural thriller High Water.* Both Adams and Brearton are published by Joffe Books, based in London.

The two authors dreamed up a cross-mojo interview where they would ask one another the kinds of questions that mainstream media sometimes misses.

Taylor Adams

T.J. Brearton interviews Taylor Adams

TJB: Okay. First question. “Where do your ideas come from?” Joking. What I really want to know is, “How long did it take you to write Eyeshot?”

TA: Too long! At least two solid years of writing, rewriting, and re-rewriting. Much of that was spent making beginner mistakes – not adhering to a schedule, getting bogged down in the first draft, et cetera – but I’m also a brutal perfectionist. The novel’s third act, in particular, I must’ve reworked a good fifty times before finally envisioning a climax I was happy with.

TJB: I’m curious as to what specifically caused you to feel bogged down in the first draft. Were you, in your perfectionist ways, trying to “get it right” too soon? Or was there something else going on?

TA: Pretty much. Getting a rough draft down on paper (even a godawful one) is such an essential first step – you can’t fix story issues if the story isn’t written yet – and I started fine-tuning much too early in the process. Like trying to wax a car that’s still on the assembly line.

TJB: As of right now, Eyeshot has broken into the top 1,000 sales ranking for Amazon Kindle and has been hanging there for some time. According to interpretations of Amazon’s sales algorithm, that puts you currently between 100 to 300 books selling per day. Did you expect this? What were your intentions for submitting Eyeshot to publishers; Just get it out there and be happy with that, or start on your way to making a living writing fiction?

TA: I’m still in shock. I’d always known that I wanted to be an author – and ideally make some money at it – but I never imagined selling this many copies on a debut. So I’m truly grateful for every reader on Amazon who’s chanced their time and money on this little thriller from an unknown author, and everyone who’s taken the time to share their thoughts on it. I hope that as I keep writing and experimenting with new stories and ideas, these readers will keep buying and enjoying. I’d love to make a full-time living at this.

TJB: You’ve worked in film. How do you think this affected writing prose? Positively? Negatively?

TA: Both, I’d say. Because filmmaking is so visual, it really hammered “show-don’t-tell” into my writing habits, and the bare-bones nature of screenwriting forced me to economize every last word. However, it’s possible to go too far in that direction and I think I went through a phase where I mistook vagueness for efficient prose.

TJB: Did you outline, or jump straight into a rough draft?

TA: I outline first, then write a rough draft. Outlining is a useful road map, but you don’t truly discover the story until you roll up your sleeves and write that godawful first draft.

TJB: How many submissions before Joffe Books?

TA: I really lucked out here. I’d queried maybe a half-dozen publishers and received one contract offer – but I turned it down because I felt their editing and art design was subpar (my fault, really, for not researching them enough first). Then I queried Not So Noble Books, heard back from Jasper, and the rest is history. Having a publisher in the UK has been a terrific way to reach a lot of readers I otherwise likely wouldn’t have.

TJB: Do you read ebooks?

TA: Of course! I’m reading the Kindle edition of Richard Matheson’s Hell House at the moment. I still appreciate reading off dead trees, though. I’m old-fashioned.

TJB: After the fuss dies down (if it does, and the way your book is going, it may not), what do you plan to do? What’s your long game? Are you currently writing another book?

TA: I’d like to produce a book every 12-18 months, and keep trying new genres and stories. Hopefully with the same degree of commercial success as Eyeshot! Until that happens, I have my day job at an NBC TV affiliate in Seattle. I love mixing suspense and dark comedy, so that will probably be a consistent theme throughout my writing career, but I’m currently really excited to be working on a psychological horror novel. Horror is fun, and in my opinion, really operates on a slower wavelength than a thriller. You have to establish normalcy before you can disrupt it in a scary way. It’s been a real learning experience.

T.J. Brearton

Taylor Adams interviews T.J. Brearton

TA: What cliché or crutch irks you most in thriller/mystery literature nowadays, and how do you avoid it (or subvert it) in your own work?

*
TJB: That’s a good question. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it. I can say that recently I was reading a book by a very popular thriller writer and was struck by how prosaic the writing was. (Of course, right there I’ve shot myself in the foot using the fifty-cent word ‘prosaic’ which, by definition, is ‘having the style or diction of prose.’ So that author was probably doing the right thing.) But that’s not really a cliché or a crutch. I’ve always written from experience. There is a caution in this; someone said if you only write from within you are doomed to repeat yourself eventually. Still, I think maybe the cliché is to try and divorce oneself too much from the material because of some imaginary mandate. This popular author I’m speaking of admits to trying to do that, but then found that readers considered him to be just like his main character anyway. So I guess this is one long-winded way of saying, “I don’t know.” Are zombies a cliché ? If so then I guess I’m sick of those.

TA: Do you research before writing – or do you construct the story first and then research a way to make everything “possible?”

TJB: I think as I move along, I’m naturally tending away from just jumping in. It’s for my own sake. I want to get to the story I’m telling myself quicker, so knowing ahead of time what’s going to be happening helps. And there’s less work on the back end this way, I think – I hope. Less trying to rearrange things or reinvent things to make the story work, if you’ve got it worked out ahead of time. Less concern for character consistency and arc of change if you already know who they are and where they’re coming from and where they’re going.

…But, your question was actually about “research,” so maybe I just went off on a huge tangent? When I think of research I think of facts to ground the story in reality. I might do a lot of research before a story, depending on what it is. And I might research along the way. If what you’re asking (sorry, it’s early and I’m on only one coffee), is whether or not I make shit up and then try to find the research to legitimize it, then no, not really. But I think it can happen accidentally, with things you just didn’t know you didn’t know. Like if I write that a coyote becomes rabid and attacks a family while picnicking, do I then later go back and make sure coyotes can be rabid? (They can’t.) I think this happens, for sure. And then you just change the coyote to a Pit Bull and hope it doesn’t totally fuck up the rest of the story.

TA: Do you write in mornings? Evenings? How much per day?

TJB: It varies, but mainly I write in the mornings. My writing schedule relates to my family’s schedule, so I usually only get about three or four solid days a week. The rest of the time I’m always thinking about a new story or a revision. (I have a waterproof notepad in the shower; highly recommend.) When I am “in session” I usually don’t look up until I’ve cleared 2,000 words. On a good morning I might write 4 or 5,000. Of course it’s not all about volume, but that’s how my first draft gets down in a three month period.

TA: Does caffeine help?

TJB: I think Hemingway said you should write drunk and edit sober or write sober and edit drunk. I can’t drink alcohol, so I get zooted on coffee enough that I can blow up things with my mind.

TA: Favorite thing a reader has told you?

TJB: That’s tough. Probably my favorite comments and reviews came from my second book, Survivors. A reader said it made them rethink things about the world. I think that’s the highest compliment I could ever be paid. It’s great to entertain and to have people love something because it employs the correct formula. But to hear the work caused someone to think about things in a different way, or that the book mirrored what was going on in the world, that’s especially gratifying.

TA: What attracted you to Joffe Books?

TJB: Why, Jasper Joffe, of course! Jasper had me at “sounds fascinating” when I pitched my first book. Even though it was over email, I could hear his British accent. I’m joking, of course, but I definitely felt right away that he was cool, and very smart, and was just what I needed and wanted. Plus the fact that he said “yes” was very attractive, haha. (Sounds like we’re dating.)

TA: My favorite thrillers are always a little harder-edged. How do you find the right amount of violence, sex, and profanity? In your writing, I mean. Not real life.

TJB: I get the feeling from our correspondence in this cross-mojo interview that we are different sorts of writers, and that’s wonderful. I say that because what I get from your answers and some of your questions is that you are very thoughtful about writing. You outline, you analyze the principles of a genre, such as horror, you consider the weight you should give to these elements you mention, and so on. This is great, because I really think it shows that people who want to write can work in the way that suits their personality; you don’t necessarily have to condition yourself in a totally new way – because I am quite different than you, I think. I don’t outline. I’ve never thought about the levels of profanity or violence from an outside perspective; if it happens in the story, that is, if I see it before my mind’s eye, then it happens.

That said, I have become somewhat trainable; if enough readers seem dissatisfied with too much cursing in a book, on the next one I might think, “Should I tone this down? Was I just having a bad morning when I dropped in all those F-bombs?”

Probably with writing, as with everything, there is balance. I think readers are savvy. If the violence or sex is really gratuitous and calculated, they’re apt to see through that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t think about it. Between what I perceive to be your more organized approach, and my more organic one, entropy has us both approaching center anyway, as I am getting a bit more organized and planful, and you’re maybe letting some things go as you experiment and “play jazz” in new genres.

Or, I could be just making this up as a story in my head.

It’s been great fun doing this. Thanks, Taylor.

* Eyeshot was the number one book in the International Mystery & Crime category on Amazon Kindle. Habit was the number one free book in the world for Amazon Kindle; Highwater has been number one in the Psychic Suspense category in both the UK and US, and the number one Police Procedural in Canada.

UPDATE October 15, 2017: Taylor has gone on to write Our Last Night and No Exit, the latter a mega-smash hit that has dominated the top 100 list on Amazon and was recently optioned by 20th Century Fox to be developed as a feature film. T.J. Brearton has written Daybreak, Dark Kills, Dark Web, Gone, Dead Gone, Buried Secrets, and Gone Missing. Gone and Dead Gone have been best-sellers on Amazon’s Top 100 list. (That’s a lot of dead-dark-gone, but no movie deals yet for Brearton…)

Nick Hanauer is possibly the smartest man on the planet. Not because he was one of the first investors in Amazon, not because he has billions of dollars and his own plane, not because he has given TED talks and been in documentaries, but because he wrote THIS:

Republicans and Democrats in Congress can’t shrink government with wishful thinking. The only way to slash government for real is to go back to basic economic principles: You have to reduce the demand for government.

I’ve read Nick’s article at topinfopost three times now. And I’m going to read it again. Because I’ve been listening for years now as my fellow humans devour one another over partisan politics, obfuscate core issues with symptomatic issues, and generally miss the forest for the trees. You don’t have to be a billionaire to see the wisdom and beauty of Nick’s treatise (and of course he didn’t intend you to have to be); while his letter is addressed to the “filthy rich” like him, it’s truly a letter for all of us. Because there are solutions to the sprawling, systemic problems we face in America. And they start with logic.

Many of our fellow citizens are starting to believe that capitalism itself is the problem. I disagree, and I’m sure you do too. Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter.

Yes, Nick. Yes, yes, and yes.

Sadly, though, there is still part of me that doubts this message will be as clear to certain others. Namely, people that abuse capitalism so that it serves their baser selves; greed and the hunger for power; the restless pursuit of immortality in the face of indomitable mortality. People that hide behind a perverted idea that capitalism needs an unrestrained, unregulated, laissez-faire monetary system in order to work. People too blind or too in denial to see that the very practice of this unbridled capitalism has fomented the bloated government invading and micromanaging our everyday lives. The kind of capitalism that makes corporations people, that insulates the wealthy from empathy and compassion, that puts *stuff* above human lives.

I first learned who Michael C. Ruppert was, probably like most people, through the 2009 documentary film, Collapse.

In that film, Ruppert covers a range of topics, from fiat currency and fractional reserve banking to climate change and alternative energy. The cohesion of Ruppert’s knowledge is impressive; the discovery of oil led to the population boom – the unfettered, exponential explosion we have experienced in the last century – and is an unsustainable phenomenon at the root of our myriad issues on Earth. Ruppert asserts that in the natural world, such population explosions are followed by a devastating collapse.

Some people could, and probably do hoot Ruppert down as a nut job. He began as a narcotics cop in Los Angeles, whose discovery and challenge of the CIA bringing drugs into the country put him on the world stage as a whistleblower in the 1990s. He later wrote books and traveled and gave speeches. Most recently, he left his home in Northern California and joined a group in the San Luis Valley who share Lakota traditions and pray for humankind and the well-being of the Earth.

It’s a logical trajectory, when you think about it. The very unfortunate part is that it ends with Ruppert taking his life.

Perhaps he had reached the point where he felt he had said all that he could. Or, that his last days were spent in Calistoga, away from the San Luis community, could suggest some painful parting of ways. Regardless of any interpretation, the self-described “faithful scout” says in the 2013 documentary Apocalypse, Man (bottom of page) that the scout’s blade is sharp on both edges. And that the scout walks alone. For me, his work and efforts can be summed up in his passionate belief that the world is in such great need of an evolution of consciousness, and that he saw this consciousness rising, catalyzed by movements like Occupy.

In his San Luis days, the Scout was most concerned with climate collapse and Fukushima as the two paramount issues sure to foment global human extinction. But there’s no point in my condensing or distilling any more of Ruppert’s contributions. I view Michael Ruppert as something of a doorkeeper, and I walked through in 2009 and have never looked back. I would invite any others, who have not yet, to do the same.

While I feel I have tempered my life to the extent that it is possible to live with the knowledge I have and still retain joy and hope, some, like Ruppert, may struggle with finding balance. Or, it’s possible his ending was something he entered into with the belief that he had accomplished what he had set out to do and now wanted to join the “spirit world.” But now I’m just conjecturing again.

Perhaps the best way to honor Ruppert and his contributions is to see him as the empathic man that he was. To stay focused and articulate in our own journeys. To keep sane in an insane world.

There are many so-called “revolutionary” groups on the planet today, challenging the money-market system, the plutocracy, and hoping to turn around the destruction of the natural world. I think we can brace ourselves for the coming years without resorting to too much extremism; e.g. I don’t believe the Illuminati is responsible for anything.

We can embrace historical knowledge, such as what we find in the wisdom of the Kali Yuga, and we can see the forecasts of this time in the New Testament of the Bible. We’re smart, collectively; we have a divinity that transcends time and space and so we contain the knowledge innately – and we had great and unimpeded access to this wisdom before times so rife with industry and technology. But we should be wary to spout conspiracy theories, to call out the monopoly media as creating false flag events or talk about “mind control” with vehement language. That kind of stuff just turns people off who might otherwise listen.

Ruppert had facts. He had data. He was passionate and could be emotional, but he was rational and reasonable, too. Well-spoken, blessed with a great vocabulary, an ability to contain so much information, decipher it and relay it topically and articulately. He was gifted, and he will be missed.

(The following documentary, in 10 parts on YouTube from VICE, is really Ruppert’s crown jewel. Raw, terrifying, and filled with Ruppert’s encyclopedic knowledge, no-nonsense attitude, emotion, expletives, and astonishing insights every person on the planet should hear.)

Like this:

These days, interns are suing producers for making them… well, intern… including reading scripts and writing script coverage when they’re not fetching coffee. People are in an uproar. If it’s not educational, and it doesn’t benefit the intern, then it’s involuntary servitude – or, illegal. But is reading screenplays educational? If so, how do the screenwriters feel about pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into a feature script only to have some unpaid intern read it and dismiss it out of hand?

I decided to sit down with Michael Gaylin, a USC Graduate who rewrote the script for the 1994 sci-fi thriller No Escape, and not ask him any of these questions.

Instead, I thought I’d see if Michael’s own story could illuminate something amid all the controversy; that no one ever said making it in the film business was easy.

TJB: Let’s get right to it and start this off with No Escape. That movie is unimpeachably awesome. First of all, it has Ray Liotta in it. And it’s about the future. On another planet. Which is a prison. I mean, come on. How did this happen for you?

MG: I am a huge science-fiction and action movie fan myself so not only did I have a kick writing this, but I also had a large mental library of genre elements and scenes that I could reference. Joel Gross wrote the first versions of the screenplay. I was hired to rewrite his script by Gale Anne Hurd’s Pacific Western production company.

At the time, Gale was unhappy with the way Richard Herley’s English novel was adapted. I went back to the novel and saw why it was a difficult task. Hurley’s novel was interesting, but it was a heavily philosophical, literary and at times talky story of banished prisoners who attempted to set up a kind of utopian society on a remote island. What it needed, I felt…was more action! I more or less started from scratch and the result was that very little was left of both the Joel Gross’s script or Mr. Hurley’s original novel, save the basic concept. Luckily Gale and the executive producer liked what I what done and the movie was given a green light.

TJB: Can you walk us through how you got there? Was there schooling, was there an agent, was there a pact with the devil? How many scripts do you write, if any, before No Escape?

MG: I’d gone to USC as a graduate student in the 1980’s. Shortly after graduating I started writing. My first project was to co-write a script with a friend from USC who had been hired by Disney. We’d worked together during school and he brought me in to pitch some ideas to the studio. They liked one of our ideas and we went to work. Unfortunately, when we were done with the project the studio decided (as if often the case) that they were not interested in going forward with the project and the script was shelved.

I was on my own and felt I had few options but to write a spec script. It took me more than a year to write the screenplay and quite a while after that to see anything came of it. Agents were distinctly cool to the story of “a crack investigative reporter who is forced into hiding in a small mid-western town when the mob puts a price on his head.” But, when a friend of mine who worked at Jon Davis’ production company at Fox read the script, she liked it. She gave it to her boss and he offered to option the script. Suddenly, now that a deal was on the table, the same agents who scoffed at the script were newly excited about its potential. (What foresight!)

From that point on, I was a working writer with an agent. But it was a difficult road. I wrote many, many drafts of The Cover for Paramount, but ultimately it too was shelved. I was at square one again and felt I had few prospects other than to write another spec script. I sat down for more than a year again to write a story. When it was finished I used the material to find a new agent that I thought would fight more aggressively for me. I was lucky and the script sold, in a bidding war, for a more than reasonable sum.

At this point, I think I was finally on the map. A small speck on the map and certainly not a household name, but nevertheless I had several offers for work. But, again as is often the case, after writing many different versions of my spec for MGM, who had bought the script, I was taken off the project and a new writer reassigned. I learned later the story was ultimately canned.

For the next several years I worked, as many writers in Hollywood do, as a rewriter. I was hired to write scripts based on original material, whether it was an idea from a producer, a novel, or an original screenplay. Most of these projects were in the action, action/comedy, or sci-fi genres. None of them went on to be produced.

At some point I met with Betsy Beers of Pacific Western where she asked if I was interested in looking at project they had called “The Colony,” a futuristic story of prisoners banished to a remote island to serve out their sentences. I was excited about the idea and set out to write the script. Many months later, over Thanksgiving holiday, I got a call from the producers, telling me that on the basis of my script the project was given a green light and was going into production.

TJB: What are you currently working on?

MG: Well…I’m no longer a screenwriter! As you can probably glean from the answers to your first questions, I was increasingly frustrated with the life of a screenwriter. Don’t get me wrong – I was happy and felt lucky to have the work. But for someone like me, who was always excited about the prospect of filmmaking, I felt a lot like a hamster on a spinning wheel – working hard but getting no closer to my ultimate goal of making films. Even after No Escape was released it was back to behind the scenes work rewriting stories that always seemed, at some point, to get shelved.

I eventually moved away from Hollywood back to the East Coast where I was raised. I founded a small video production studio called Aurora Video in upstate New York that is now thriving. And I’m much more satisfied. These days, nothing ends up on the shelf. And I’m still making short films, documentaries and am working on a script for a feature film that I hope one day to direct.

TJB: You live in Woodstock, NY, not far from where transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson did their signature work. What is it about the area, then and now, which seems to draw creative thinkers?

Thoreau

MG: The area does have a rich history as a draw for artists of all types. Actors, painters, and especially musicians. It’s a beautiful area. And its proximity to New York means a lot of talented people who have made their careers in the city find their way here. In the early 20th century a lot of maverick, free thinkers came to this area and established artist’s colonies. And I think that spirit has survived.

TJB: What’s to become of us on Planet Earth? To tailor that question to suit the fact you wrote a movie about a prison-planet: What do you make of the prisoner-to-citizen ratio in the U.S.? Is the money-market a de facto system failure? Can we build a resource-based economy?

MG: As you may suspect, I am rather cynical about the direction we seem to be taking the planet these days. And as a father of a 12 year-old daughter, I’m extremely worried about all the challenges. But one of the reasons I was drawn to Woodstock is this is a very progressive, future-thinking community. I think it’s from this kind of local base, and others around the world, that the solutions to such existential problems as global warming, increasing income inequality, and the incarceration epidemic are to be found. And I think the will to follow through with these solutions will be forged here as well. Otherwise, we may find ourselves, like the inhabitants of a fictional future prison colony – with no escape.

Perhaps the signature characteristic of our time is our political polarization. Right and Left have always argued, but the radical views and vehemence of late may indicate something else, something deeper at work. Something that can actually unify us, if we stop letting it fracture us.

It’s seems that these days, everybody’s yelling about something. In the echo chamber of social media, we hear grievances again and again. In the din, it’s possible to lose the sense of what it means to be conservative, or what it means to be liberal. And, maybe we should. Especially when it comes to our freedoms.

There is an objective, non-partisan reality that we are living under the weight of an increasingly bloated government. And that massive, complex governments characterize the end of empires, historically. But the more we squabble, the more the government grows complex, as filigrees of judicia sprout over alternative solutions, like dendrites in the brain, requiring more laws and more enforcement and more courtroom battles.

We need to keep sight of the big picture.

In Florida right now, for instance, it is illegal to live off the grid. Living off the grid means self-sufficiency, supplying oneself the power or water or both to survive without being connected to systems under the “International Property Maintenance Code.”

You read that right. Handcuffed at gunpoint for living sustainably through alternative resources.

Controlling someone to not live self-sufficiently is fascist, Orwellian, and downright terrifying. It’s everything counter-intuitive to living in a free country. Running people out of an off-grid neighborhood with SWAT teams, that’s an idea people usually roll their eyes at and chalk up to conspiracy theory, or attribute to some “backwards foreign country.” But it’s happening, it’s happening now, and it’s happening here.

So, who are the folks actually building these homes and communities on their own steam? Are these people unstaunched liberal renegades, out there doing the alternative lifestyle-thing with green, renewable energy, or are they the hardened, doomsday-prepping conservatives who say, “Look pal, you can’t tell me how I should or shouldn’t live my life…”?

Hmmm.

We’ll hear all sorts of justifications for these unreasonable laws and brutal enforcements. We’ll hear about how it’s for our safety. Or, at the very least, it’s for accurate census-taking. But far worse than the rhetoric, we’ll hear the conservatives in the media spouting about how this latest instance of invasive government is just more from the bleeding hearts and their liberal agenda, or we’ll hear the liberals complaining that it’s the ignorant conservatives who don’t believe in climate change or resource depletion or the benefits of alternative energy sources.

But the reason why Florida and Texas are working to make it impossible to live off the grid has nothing to do with political ideology.

It’s about money.

That’s it.

It’s control exerted by the monied interests. And those interests, as they permeate government, skewer and make stick-puppets of both sides of the aisle.

It’s about greed, and the means to power. It’s not a nefarious scheme, it’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s not the Illuminati, it’s human nature. Without reasonable, enforceable restrictions on the corporate lobbying industry, or on the size and shape corporations are allowed to take, we inherit a plutocracy, an oligarchic government that is the farthest thing from a popular democracy. It is not for the people or by the people. It’s for the ruthless and unsympathetic, the “Imma get mine” addicts out there competing to be the richest man or woman in the grave. People who often justify their position through a perversion of the capitalist theory that pure self-interest will be the best for everyone.

Our government has grown complex, and we have become an over-regulated society, precisely because of the deregulation and championed, selfish individualism which preceded this period. While it’s easy to conflate the development of a large government with a liberal agenda, it’s just as easy to make the case that unfettered capitalism and neoclassical economics are what dragged us here. The allowance of plundering, the absence of maximum salaries or a reasonable ceiling for wealth and capital, the co-opting and tailoring of maxims from our predecessors – from Darwin to Jefferson to Adam Smith. Greed and nearsightedness characterize the legacy of post-war America.

So, if you’re not in favor of big government inhibiting our basic freedoms, but can realize that it’s our current version of capitalism (since, at least, the formation of the Fed, and then spanked into hyper-drive in the 70s and 80s) which got us here — then one what side of the aisle does that plant you?

No, labels shouldn’t matter much. And they don’t. It’s the de facto dismissal – or even outright hatred – based on party presumptions, which plagues our society. So it’s not so much the labeling that needs to be addressed, but the root of our division, the culprits fanning the flames to overblow our differences of opinion and personality into something much more than they need to be.

Everywhere I look lately, I see problems that are affecting all of us (none the least of which is mandatory, on-the-grid, police-enforced living), but we’re so at odds about how these problems came into being, or what to do about them.

The thing is, this sort of confusion, squabbling, and derision are what an impinging plutocracy of monied interests want from us. We serve them best when we’re quibbling over political trivia. Arguing party dogma, picking fights over symptomatic issues. Distracted, consuming, and misinformed, this is today’s ideal citizen. One who doesn’t question from where their food, energy, or currency comes. One who focuses on party ideology and makes an enemy out of their brother or sister.

What we need to do is stop fighting and to stop giving them what they want. We need to come together.

There are people out there who care. You’re one of them. And there are legislators who are trying to do the right thing. There is good in the world, tucked away in places. But right now, the big, pasty, bald-headed, red-faced, puff-adder white bastards are winning. And they each have more resources than ten thousand of us, and their greatest resource is their ability to manipulate popular opinion – to essentially manufacture that opinion in a culture industry with which the hydra-like tentacles are roping around the megabytes in your computer as we speak.

In fact, just yesterday, The Supreme Court overturned four decades years of national policy and judicial precedent when the Court decided to allow federal officeholders to solicit and individual donors to pour as much as $3.6 million directly into federal campaigns every election cycle – “buying unparalleled personal influence in Washington and drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens.” (Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor)

This is not good.

We need to begin remaking the world by quitting the quibbling. We work to make the adjustments we can in our own lives – and, at every step of the way, we question, we learn, and we have real conversations with one another. Not snarky banter about left versus right, but a dialog that looks deep into the mystic. Not fighting one another, but fighting the monied interests that have influenced our food supply, our children’s schooling, our air, our water, our land – every aspect of our lives. We do this by finding our center, by learning to balance ourselves in preparation for the long haul and the uphill battle – to take joy in what we can, in our families, in our friends, in life’s small pleasures. We derive strength and love from these things, and then we stand together to put an end to the cycle of empires.